continued: Covering the War on Terrorism
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Q: I have a couple of questions and comments. The first is to Mr. Al-Mirazi of Al-Jazeera. I've always been curious to know if Al-Jazeera has any problems doing reporting on political, social, cultural, economic events in Qatar. I've seen a lot of your reporting in other places, but being based there and getting funding from that government, does that affect reporting there. Another thing is that you mentioned Al-Jazeera had been hoping to become independent and pay for itself through advertising, and I want to say, don't go that way. I'm saying that because it's nice not to have corporate sponsored media, it's nice to have perspectives that are not totally influenced by CEOs of companies who can threaten to withdraw advertising if they don't like your reporting. We've seen that in this country—"Politically Incorrect" has been pulled off a lot of stations because of some comments that Bill Maher made, and it wasn't because the network decided they didn't like the show, it's because the advertisers wouldn't pay for it anymore.

I wanted to also give Mr. Kalb a chance to revisit the last comment you made as you ended your presentation, where you said you felt the TV media has not been doing as good a job as the print, which I totally agree with, but you thought that perhaps they'd been doing the best job they could given the circumstances. I was wondering if you could talk about what you think those circumstances are that you think are keeping them from doing a good job. I've been appalled by a lot of reporting on TV—on Larry King, at the end of every show now, someone comes on and sings a patriotic song with a big flag in the background. He never did that before, and now it's all the time. Aaron Brown on CNN—I stopped watching after one day his monologue before the news was, today was the most tragic day of the war so far, this is the highest number of casualties yet in this war, and he was referring to a couple of Americans who had died. To the American military it's maybe the biggest tragedy of this war, but there had been hospitals bombed earlier, by accident, but dozens of Afghani civilians had died. And they report that it's the biggest tragedy when three Americans die. It's so American-centric that it's almost intolerable. Dan Rather says I'll do anything my president asks me to, Cokie Roberts says when I see the generals with their big stars I just melt. How can we expect someone like that to ask any hard questions? Finally, of course, there's Geraldo… [audience laughter]…right. So the point is the comment that they're doing the best they can given the circumstances-I'd like to hear you elaborate on that, because I haven't see that.

Al-Mirazi: I'll respond to the second question in a way that will be relevant to the first. I'd like Al-Jazeera to rely mainly on commercials and advertisements in order to give you a more frank answer about the first question. [Audience laughter and applause.] However, if you're looking for examples of whether the government of Qatar has been criticized, did we put points of view against things that they did which weren't that acceptable or satisfying for the majority of the audience, yes, we did, and we have many examples. For example, when they hosted the Middle East-North Africa economic conference and they invited Israel, at that time I think during the government of Netanyahu, Al-Jazeera brought a Qatari government official and someone who was against him, and they debated the issue as if the story involved Egypt or Sudan or any other government. Also, when the Qatari foreign minister met with Shimon Peres six or seven months ago here in Washington, he was interviewed, and the anchor actually almost grilled him about whether it's good timing, whether he's breaking the Arab League recommendations to freeze all contact with Israel, for countries that have not signed peace treaties them, which is all but Egypt and Jordan. Even during our coverage of the war in Afghanistan, some officials in the government of Qatar said that they have nothing to do with it, no bases, no effort from the government of Qatar in the US military operation. Later on we found that the first casualty related to the war was in Qatar, in a French-built air base that is used for logistics by the US for the war in Afghanistan. I didn't hesitate to say that contrary to whatever the government officials are saying, that air force man died there, and that's proof that an air force base in Qatar is used in the war in Afghanistan, even if just for logistic matters. Also, the body politic in Qatar is so limited that you don't have much to report about, which is different from the case in Egypt or Morocco or Jordan, and this is part of it. This is not the government of Great Britain, that the BBC could relax and say we're going to keep getting public funds. It depends on who is coming next to rule Qatar, if he has the same philosophy as the current emir, but for all of these reasons we would rather rely on people who pulled out the advertisements from Bill Maher's show than to rely on a government.

Kalb: In response to your second point about which is better, to have commercials or money provided by corporations, or…you didn't quite fill in the other point. My own experience would lead me to conclude very strongly that I will any day of the week take a network that gets its money from any number of corporations, whoever will provide the money, rather than from a government. If you can do it in some other way, and there are middle grounds there, for example one now unfolding in Sweden, which is very interesting. I'm not saying that corporate sponsorship is ideal, but I have never known a time when corporate sponsorship has prevented me from saying anything on the air, anything. So when you talk about Bill Maher, that is not in my book any way journalism, it's a form of political entertainment.

My second point, which I'd like to make, and it's not going to get us very far-one of the most difficult things today is to define the media. Up until Spiro Agnew in 1969, most journalists knew pretty much what it was to be a reporter, because you worked for a network, you worked for a newspaper, you covered the news, and we understood what "the news" was, and we understood what a reporter was. Today, one gets overlapped with the other, and it's extremely difficult to find out what journalism is. You mention Larry King doing something, then you mention Aaron Brown doing something. Theoretically Aaron Brown is the reporter, and Larry King is a talk show host. If we put Larry King in the same category of journalism, we are all in serious trouble, because he is not a journalist. He doesn't even make a claim to being a journalist. When we have talk shows, that isn't news, that's commentary about news. That's different from the reporting of news. And I think one of the most difficult things we face today, not just in the US but in the countries I've studied and where I've reported from, is that one overlaps into the other so that very intelligent people, graduate students, lose sight of the fact that journalism is the reporting of news. Information, commentary, opinion, that is something different, and when on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, you have the two coming together as has happened, that is a serious flaw in contemporary journalism, and we ought to be aware of it, and I think we ought to define much more clearly what it is we have in mind when we talk about journalism and news.

Charmelot: I'd like to add a comment about Marvin's point about big corporations funding networks. The BBC exemplifies the capacity of a government to finance a prestigious news outlet without interfering in the way this outlet provides news to the public. My company is funded half by the clients and half by the government, and again there is no interference in the journalistic activities by the government. So I think we could also have a more balanced approach. When it comes to the remarks you made about our friend Larry King not being in the same league, I think he's making $7 million or more a year, which is a hefty amount for a journalist.

Q: Mr. Khouri, you said that the emotional coverage Al-Jazeera does is an obstacle to democratization and liberalization. My question is, why so we assume that secular democracy, democratization, liberalization are the answers to the Arab world and the Muslim world's problems? I see the same thing when I read columns and read the news, that non-Muslims and Muslims alike always go to the same conclusion, that secularism is the answer to our problems. For me this is a little baffling, and I'd like to hear your opinion on this, because in the end what is so appealing about secular democracy when we end up with so many corrupt politicians and a disillusioned political base in this country? From my perspective, the more Muslims that move to these Western ideals, the more we seem to suffer and become more exploited by other countries. The only time the Muslim world has been successful and prosperous has been under the times of the khalifa. Let us not forget that Jews and Christians have fared the best under Islamic government 500, 600, 700 years ago. We need to take a middle road between the extremes of secular democracy and Talibanism. The moderate approach is moderate Islamic government. Why isn't that considered a viable approach by the media, whether it be by non-Muslims or Muslims?

Khouri: Those are very good points. What I said is that western commentators lauded Al-Jazeera as a harbinger of democracy and opening up, etc., and I'm not sure that that's the case. I agree with you. I've repeatedly written over the years that the western model of capitalist, liberal, republican Jeffersonian type democracy is not, clearly, catching on in the Arab world. The answer is simply to turn to the Arab people and give them an opportunity to decide what they want. If they want something that is rooted in their cultural values and their religious values and their historical legacy, whatever system the Arab people want to devise that reflects the will of the majority and protects the rights of the minority is the system that we should develop. This is the great challenge for us in the Arab world. What I'm saying is that the impact of the Arab satellite stations is not yet clear.

We see these characters debating on TV—and I agree with Marvin, this is entertainment. Larry King is entertainment, it's not journalism. It's very effective entertainment; I love watching this guy on Fox, O'Leary. I think it's tremendous entertainment. And I see it as entertainment. Sometimes I learn something, but it's just great fun to watch. I flip from that to the Syracuse-Georgetown basketball game [audience laughter] and I view it with exactly the same criteria. I think what a lot of the Arab satellite stations are doing is political entertainment. Now, they're also doing a really good news service in some cases, but even the news reporting is not always as professional as I'd want it to be, it's a little bit colored. But so is the news reporting here. The key thing we have to remember is that we have to work not to emulate Western traditions or reject them, but to turn to our own people and figure out how we can unleash the energy and creativity and power in Arab culture and the Arab people and to stop the situations as we have today with people like Saad Eddin Ibrahim and his colleagues at the Ibn Khaldun Center being in jail and being tried, while they should be given medals of honor for the promotion of decency and dignity and respect and pluralism and human rights in the Arab world. I mention Saad Eddin Ibrahim and the Ibn Khaldun Center as often as I can because this represents to me the worst of modern Arab political culture, and this is a situation that defines the lives of most people in our region. We have to keep fighting against that, not copying the West but finding the answers through our own traditions and on our own decisions. [audience applause]

Al-Mirazi: I agree with Rami on most of the things that he touched on before, but I beg to differ about if we can replace the slogan "religion is the opiate of the people" to "Al-Jazeera or the satellite TV is the opiate of the Arab peoples." I don't think it's a positive sign if we want to broadcast in order to get people out in the street demonstrating and it's a negative sign if because of this coverage people aren't active any more. I think if we can get something out of that coverage, which is building some kind of consensus among our people about the main issues-we didn't have this kind of dialogue before between the whole Arab community and Arab countries-if we can get this kind of consensus, of what the borders of Israel are, what's the role of religion, other questions like that, if we can debate it long enough I think we can get something good out of it. We don't have this kind of consensus on most of our values in our society, and that would be good. Of course we aren't going to get democracy in five or ten or fifteen years out of this experience.

Charmelot: I just wanted to point out that in the Arab world—if there's such a thing as the 'Arab world', we have to be very careful in using that term—there are other media where you can have the political and democratic debate. There are great newspapers with a tradition of political debate in the Middle East-Al-Nahar, Al-Hayat, the Daily Star. You have also radio that is broadcast all around the Middle East in Arabic like Radio Monte Carlo. Al-Jazeera is a great experience, there's no doubt about it, it's the new kid on the block. But there's been a tradition of political debate, democratic debate, great reporters, great journalists, great thinkers that have expressed themselves in press of the Arab world, and that should not be forgotten.

Q: A man by the name of Ralph Peters, who is a retired army officer, has written a series of editorials for the Wall Street Journal since Sept. 11, and his latest in that series is an article entitled "The Saudi Threat," which I believe was published the second of January. In that article he calls for a diplomatic split between the United States and Saudi Arabia and even goes so far as to advocate the seizure of Saudi Arabian oil fields by the US military. This article is filled with emotional, hurtful and jingoistic rhetoric, and it's also misinformed and based on unsubstantiated claims and poor factual research. My question is, is it the responsibility of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board to include such views, or is it the responsibility of editorial boards like the Wall Street Journal's to make sure that they don't make it to print?

Kalb: It is the privilege of the editorial board of any newspaper to decide what it is that it wishes to publish. If it wishes to publish this stuff—I've read it, by the way, and I was as taken aback by some of the comments that Peters wrote as you apparently are—but if you're raising the issue of whether an editorial board has a responsibility to convey a certain image of the world or of the country, I suppose in one way you could argue yes, it does, but it's it's responsibility and it's privilege, it's right to decide what that is. There is a new editor of the editorial board and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot, who used to appear regularly on the NewsHour, and there's no question that that page reflects to some extent his view. I would say, write him a letter. Argue. Complain. Let him know that you don't buy it.

Charmelot: And I'm sure that if the Saudi ambassador wanted to respond he will.

Kalb: Oh, he does. He's not shy.

Charmelot: And he could get into the Wall Street Journal too. These are just opinions and they can be published.

Q: I have a question not so much about the grand policy of reporting the war and Sept. 11, but more about a specific set of issues which I understand are being discussed in the Arab world and perhaps discussed on the Internet in this country involving the connection of Israel with the Sept. 11 activities. I don't know the answer to this question, but I know there are rumors flying both in the Arab world and in this world about for example Israeli companies in the World Trade Center which had prior notice of the bombings, the arrest by the United States government of Israeli spies shortly after Sept. 11. These stories are floating around in the background, indeed there's a reporter named Carl Cameron who reported for Fox News who is complaining that his stories have been suppressed by Fox News. I'm interested to hear if any of you have knowledge of these rumors, the truth of them, or what is going on in journalism about them.

Charmelot: The rumor as such is a story. If that rumor is spread on the Internet, in chat rooms, in itself it gives a dimension to the event that we have to report-not saying it's true or not, this is not the point. The fact that the rumor itself is propagated through the Internet, the fact that someone is at the origin of that rumor, the fact that people are responding and arguing about it, that itself could be material for reporting. But to the first part of your question, if it's possible to find out if the information itself is true, I think it's impossible to know. It's beyond the means of a normal news outlets. We don't have the capacity to investigate this kind of allegation. That's the duty of intelligence services, not news organizations. But again, the fact of the rumors itself is an interesting story-why those people are spreading them, why are they talking about it, where does it come from, how many people are sharing that information. That could be a valid story.

Kalb: Very reluctantly I'd like to offer a demurral on that. I think one of the great problems that we have in contemporary journalism is that rumor, when it is reported even as rumor, becomes fact. It changes its very nature, and at what point is a rumor justified. What the gentleman has discussed has been denied all over the place, and if every Israeli company were out of that building before it was attacked, that would have been a front-page story in every newspaper in the world. But it wasn't, and therefore I assume it never happened, and I believe that all of it ends up-and you can investigate this because it's also on the Internet-being an invention of some people in Brazil, where the rumors started. It didn't start in the Middle East, it started in Brazil, and then it was picked up on the Internet, which is one of the enormous problems today in understanding what it is that we're talking about. That's why I appealed before for some measure of concern about defining the media and what it is that we're talking about, what is reliable. Rumors ought to be handled as rumors, meaning that unless you know they're a fact, there shouldn't be reporting.

Charmelot: But the point you were just making, that these rumors came out of Brazil, that it's clearly information that has no grounds, that is to be reported. It is in the air, it's out there, some people are putting it out there. Our duty is to investigate that part that we can investigate. You just pointed out that it's not coming from the Middle East, it's coming from Brazil. Those are facts. What I'm trying to say is that we're not giving any credence to the rumor as such, we're just trying to articulate the mechanism that brought the rumor into being and trying to point out the danger of that rumor.

Khouri: The real story about this rumor, to me-and it's obviously a false rumor-is why so many people in the Middle East believe it. That's the story, and that's the great story that the American media has completely flopped on covering. The real story is why do people spread these rumors and believe them as fact. It's fantastic when you think about it, that the big-sticker items in this are why did this attack of Sept. 11 happen, is it likely to happen again, what can we do to prevent it or minimize the chances of it happening again. I would argue that on those three crucial big-sticker issues the American people today are no more well-informed than they were on Sept. 10. We have no idea, no answer to any of those three questions. And this is the real challenge I think we have to address, and I wish more people in the United States would raise these issues in a serious way.

Al-Mirazi: Carl Cameron's story on Fox News was really four parts on different days, starting Dec. 11 or 12 to Dec. 15; he did do a lot of investigation. He had two years earlier a story about whether there is wire tapping in the White House, or Bill Clinton telling Monica Lewinsky that he feels there is a foreign embassy that is spying on him. Unfortunately when I did some research just three days ago about that story about the rumors—and it's not a widely circulated story in the Arab world—I couldn't find any other media outlet in the US that researched or investigated to say that this rumor is not true. This is a case where we should ask why nobody dared to discuss it, after Fox News killed the story, and also why hundreds of people are now in prisons because of rumors and nobody cares to get them out or investigate them. This is very important. We shouldn't have taboos when we discuss about Israel, or Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

Q: I just want to say that for me Al-Jazeera has been heaven-sent more than anything else. Mr. Khouri, you say that it's had emotional reporting, but I say, so what. First of all, at least when I go to Al-Jazeera I'm going to see raw footage, I'm going to see the issues being covered that are near and dear to me, such as when Israel occupied Lebanon and then finally pulled out in 2000. These kinds of stories, the atrocities that Israelis commit every single day against Palestinians, the sanctions on Iraq. I think it's about time we had a media service that caters to our needs, our perspectives, and our opinions. I get mad when somebody criticizes that, because this is the only media outlet that we have, and we need it.

Q: I was somewhat disturbed, frankly, when I heard people speaking about journalism and the influence simply of government and corporate sponsorship, when I really feel that the most significant influence on journalism today is whether or not people are going to buy it. I think it's easy to forget that if nobody buys the news that people are selling, it just won't be published any more. That's a central fact, no matter where in the world we are.

Khouri: That's a very important point, and that's what I was saying by saying that both the American and many of the Arab media are pandering to what their markets want, what their audiences want. These are largely market-driven, entertainment-value-based operations. There's some good hard straight news reporting, but what you're getting now is largely a market-driven process. It's so competitive, and the market is fragmenting-it's fragmenting here, and it's fragmenting in the Middle East. We don't have a golf channel yet, but we're on the way. We're getting these specialized stations, and the radio stations are fragmenting more quickly than the television stations. So, yes, you're absolutely right, and the hope is, the ideal is that when you open up a system you get the Foxes and the CNNs and the PBSs and the NPRs and the New York Times, you get a range. This is what so impresses me about the United States, the amazing range of material that's available at your fingertips. The Internet, of course, exponentially expands that. But I think these are the rules of the game now, this is market-driven modernity, and this is what a lot of people are rebelling against in the Arab and the Islamic world and other places. They want not market-driven but morality-driven modernity, they want a modern world that is based on some values and some integrity, and not just by the market forces of catering to what people want.

Charmelot: I think there's a huge body of information available to every single citizen around the world without having to pay anything. You can listen to very good programs almost everywhere in the world without having to pay. Again, the market aspect I don't deny, but if you feel the need or make the effort to access the news you can do so without being constrained by any kind of economic imperatives or dimensions. I think by and large the information is circulating pretty widely in the world and pretty freely.

Hudson: I'd like to thank all of the panelists, we've covered a lot of ground, and thank the audience for your attention and your comments. TBS